On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 10:35 AM, Jason Hobbs jason.hobbs@calxeda.com wrote:
On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 11:08:04AM -0400, Rob Herring wrote:
On 10/17/2011 11:30 PM, Grant Likely wrote:
[snip]
- Implement rudimentary boot menu support in u-boot (if it doesn't
already exist). Doesn't need to be graphical, but at least have a default boot with a list of other boot options.
PXE boot support for u-boot just went in yesterday. This includes some generic menu support as part of it.
The PXE code also includes a parser for pxelinux config files (really a subset of pxelinux config file format). Since the syntax is the same for syslinux config files, it would be straightforward to readapt the parser to work for those too.
I think syslinux would work. It is something the OS could generate at kernel upgrade time, and when booting off disk it would avoid the need for the OS to figure out what specific magic the firmware uses to boot. From what I can tell, the syslinux config file is limited, but it should be sufficient for what we need in the short term. If u-boot grows the ability to correctly identify the boot FAT partition for both the MBR & GPT uses cases, then making it pick up and use a syslinux file is trivial.
However, it does seem to require the kernel image to reside in the FAT partition which isn't really what we want in the longer term.
g.